Category: Ubuntu

thummer is a website-snapshot and thumbnailing utility I am working on, built using django. Read my previous thummer blog post to find out more about the project.

Assumptions

In this article, I am assuming that we are installing thummer on an existing Ubuntu server (8.04 or later) with Apache already installed, and that you are comfortable with editing apt’s sources.list file.

Step 1: Install A “Fake” X-Server

If you do not have a desktop environment installed on your server (probably a good thing!), then you will need to install xvfb, which provides a virtual screen so that we can capture the rendered output of the website:

Xvfb provides an X server that can run on machines with no display hardware and no physical input devices. It emulates a dumb framebuffer using virtual memory.

Step 3: Install Django

For hardy only: The version of django hardy ships with is too old for thummer. Install Jaunty’s version of python-django from the updates repository by downloading the .deb file from Launchpad (remember to keep an eye out for future security updates):